Let Employee Feedback Inform Benefit Decisions: 13 Tips from Leaders
From creating a priority list based on demand to looking over your team’s data, here are 13 answers to the question, “Can you share your best tip for using employee feedback to inform decisions about future changes to benefits offerings?”
- Prioritize by Demand
- Poll It
- Ask Open-Ended Questions
- Consider It from the Employees’ Perspective
- Communicate With Your Team
- Hold Individual and Team Meetings
- Streamline Offerings
- Match Your Employee Needs to Industry Benchmark Trends
- Get Regular Feedback
- Review What is Popular and Unpopular
- Pilot Test New Benefits First
- Make Sure Your Questions Are Relevant
- Focus on the Data
Prioritize by Demand
Use employee feedback to understand the needs of your staff when considering future benefits. Use polls and open feedback systems to help your business understand what concerns are most prominent in the minds of your average employee.
With that information, it will be much easier for management and owners to assess how they can change or add benefits that address the needs of their employees. Your business will use that employee feedback to change your benefits plans that will actually matter to employees and hopefully result in higher job satisfaction for both existing employees and any new hires that join your ranks in the future.
Max Schwartzapfel, CMO, Schwartzapfel Lawyers
Poll It
Polls can be a great way to understand feedback for benefit adjustments for your business. While standard feedback can give you a list of what employees want, polling can give you a better understanding of how big a particular need weighs on the minds of your staff.
This can help your business to build out a step-by-step plan to address employee needs in your benefits package. You’ll be able to better prioritize the greatest needs of workers and meet those more quickly.
Employees will feel satisfied by the changes your business is implementing, and your business won’t have to struggle with trying to expedite sweeping reforms. Use feedback to create an effective timetable for benefit changes, and share that knowledge with your staff. It will make transitioning easier for everyone.
Liza Kirsh, Chief Marketing Officer, Dymapak
Ask Open-Ended Questions
I would advise asking the right questions. And by that, I mean asking open-ended questions to truly understand what employees want and need in terms of benefits.
Rather than simply providing a checklist or limited options, open-ended questions allow them to share unique ideas and preferences that you haven’t thought of before. It can be a useful resource to change your benefit offerings, resulting in a more satisfied workforce.
Shaun Connell, Founder, Writing Tips Institute
Consider It from the Employees’ Perspective
My best tip for using employee feedback to inform decisions about future changes to benefits offerings is to listen to the feedback of your employees and really consider their perspectives.
Ask for specific feedback about what benefits they would like to see offered and why, and be open to hearing their ideas. Make sure to keep an open dialogue with your employees and keep them updated on changes and progress made based on their feedback.
Lukasz Zelezny, SEO Consultant, SEO Consultant London
Communicate With Your Team
One of the best things companies can do is involve their employees in the decision-making process. Share the feedback results with a diverse group of employees and discuss possible changes.
Instead of assuming certain solutions will work for employees, simply ask. This can be done through town hall meetings, focus groups, or surveys.
It makes sense to start with a broad survey for overall feedback and then take proposed solutions and run them by your employees again.
Kelli Anderson, Career Coach, Resume Seed
Hold Individual and Team Meetings
The goal of employee feedback is to help the team function properly and improve performance and productivity. But how to use employee feedback effectively so that it will help in future changes and make better decisions? For this, hold individual and team meetings. Try to dig deep into the thoughts of team members about the feedback.
Keep the feedback report with you while conducting a team meeting and ask questions. This way, you can collect information that will help you make the right decisions. Asking employees for their input and considering their feedback, these small steps are more effective in increasing engagement that benefits offerings.
Furthermore, team meetings involve employees in choices that directly impact their work and also accelerate the overall growth of the company. It is because you can predict future changes and get both negative and positive points from discussions with employees.
Saikat Ghosh, Associate Director of HR and Business, Technource
Streamline Offerings
Changing benefits to meet employee needs isn’t just about adding more to the package. Employers should also be willing to look at what to remove from the benefits package in order to put their efforts into the most beneficial and employee-sought-after benefits. Trimming the unpopular may also enable employers to provide higher tiers of more popular benefits with the resources that they save by nixing the least popular elements.
In order to make sure this strategy works well, employers will need to make sure of employee intentions by checking and rechecking feedback, running polls, and talking to their staff and HR department to gain an in-depth understanding of employee needs.
With a bit of effort, this can help your business to design a slimmed-down, employee-centric benefits package that doesn’t waste on excess. Both employees and employers will get behind it.
Max Ade, CEO, Pickleheads
Match Your Employee Needs to Industry Benchmark Trends
An employee benefits package is a critical part of our family business. As we need to measure and stay competitive with the best possible rewards and incentives that best align to support our loyal customer demand, we turn to industry-leading HR providers to help assess and evaluate our employee benefits package.
These providers have surveys, analytics, benchmarking, and more to measure the effectiveness of the package in terms of cost-effectiveness to help us ensure employee retention. After we have this benchmark of data, we truly welcome employee feedback to make sure the benefits best match our overall employee needs.
By doing so, we hope that our family business can continue to strive for a better workplace environment and improved performance for our most valuable asset: our employees!
Donna Werner, Chief Administrative Officer and Co-founder, GhostBed
Get Regular Feedback
Having a regular feedback system in place in your office is invaluable for managers who want to use that data for decision-making. One problem with sending out surveys whenever you need information is that a one-time survey is only as helpful as its questions. If you don’t ask the right thing, you don’t know the full scope of your employees’ thoughts.
However, instituting a feedback system in which employees have regular conversations with their managers will help leadership have a better grasp on what matters to their workers. This will help them make informed decisions about what benefits should be adjusted or kept as-is.
Josh Weiss, Founder and CEO, Reggie
Review What is Popular and Unpopular
Employee feedback gives you excellent insight into what is working regarding your benefits program. You can gauge what is popular and unpopular to help with future decision-making by analyzing the feedback.
The best approach is to redirect the resources from the least popular benefits and gear them toward a revamped popular benefits program. Moreover, you can gain subtle hints on what employees want to be implemented and incorporate this into your program.
Liam Liu, Co-founder and CMO, ParcelPanel
Pilot Test New Benefits First
Pilot test any new benefits with a small group of willing employees before fully rolling them out. Doing this will allow management to identify any issues or challenges with the proposed benefits and ensure the proper adjustments are made before the new benefits are available to the entire workforce.
Pilot testing helps alleviate potential frustrations and hiccups with the rollout of a new benefits program.
Will Baker, Founder, Skirtings R Us
Make Sure Your Questions Are Relevant
To ensure that you are using employee feedback effectively, it is essential to ask the right questions. The right questions are those that relate to something you can change.
For example, asking employees about their overall satisfaction with their benefits package may be useful for assessing morale, but it does not provide specific information that can make improvements. Instead, consider asking more targeted questions to gather specific feedback that can be used to make meaningful changes to your benefit packages.
Lilia Koss, Community Manager, Facialteam
Focus on the Data
My best tip for using employee feedback to inform decisions about future changes to benefits offerings is to focus on the data. Collecting qualitative and quantitative data from employees is important for understanding their needs. Ask your employees detailed questions about the benefits they currently have, what other benefits they would like, and how the current offerings could be improved.
Gabriel Bogner, Co-founder, Mate Fertility
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